Ti West hive, unite! With less than a month to go until the debut of the much-anticipated horror film MaXXXine, production company A24 has dropped the newest trailer for the summer flick featuring Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, and Bobby Canavale.
The newly-released trailer amps up the 1980s nostalgia by starting with a voiceover — bring them back! — for a film-within-a-film called Puritan II. It also takes a decidedly more comical tone than the first trailer, as Elizabeth Debicki smears bright red blood on the smiling face of Lily Collins, who plays an actress in the fictional Puritan film.
As in the previous trailer, this one shows Maxine Minx — whom Goth previously played in the horror trilogy’s first installment, X — navigating ’80s Los Angeles as she tries to become an actress and evade the Night Stalker, the real-life serial killer who acts as a bogeyman for the film.
Ti West’s horror trilogy tells a complex interlocking story of sex and stardom across multiple decades. In X, Goth played both the Maxine featured in the upcoming film, as well as an older version of the character Pearl, who was the subject of the second film in the trilogy, released later in 2022. (Pearl took place in 1918 Texas, decades before the events of X.)
The Night Stalker, whose real name was Richard Ramirez, has become a subject of multiple media portrayals in recent years. The real-life serial killer and sex offender, who operated in Los Angeles from 1984 to 1985, according to USA Today, was sentenced to death in 1989 and died while waiting to be executed in 2013. Since then, Ramirez’s story has been the subject of 2021’s Netflix docuseries Night Stalker: Hunt for a Serial Killer, as well as 2019’s installment of American Horror Story, subtitled 1984.
According to Letterboxd, which ranks yet-to-open films by popularity, MaXXXine is currently the most-anticipated upcoming film of the year among their userbase.
Despite its monumental buzz, the film has not been without controversy. In January, James Hunter, a background actor on MaXXXine, sued Mia Goth and A24, as Variety reported. In the suit, Hunter claims that Goth “intentionally” kicked him in the head while shooting a scene in which Hunter played a “dead parishioner” and was lying on the ground. Hunter claims Goth was explicitly warned to watch out for Hunter and that, after the incident, she “taunted, mocked and belittled” him in the bathroom. Hunter claims that after the incident he was asked not to return to set. Goth has denied the allegations and asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed.
MaXXXine arrives in theaters on July 5.
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